Personally think it should not get refunded. There’s no sane way to get it back to its source. And no one group should be making profit from it. Best if it stays with the government like a federal forfeiture so in theory we all benefit from it as citizens , maybe it goes against the national debt or lessens our deficit next year.
The primary function of the FCC is in engineering compliance: HAAT, power, frequency, contour, allocation etc. Their other functions are secondary. Our broadcast regulatory infastruction is more like Canada, not North Korea. We only regulate content very nominally. A change in this philosophy is chilling.
They're not a rulemaking agency. They're very tightly bound by an entire dedicated section of the US Title Code.
More importantly licensees pledge to serve their _local_ communities and maintain _local_ standards. That's the entire well documented point of the license system. As such the FCC has very little actual authority over stations outside of general technical requirements of the radio broadcast itself and no authority over content unless prompted by local complaints.
Does this phrase have non obvious meaning? They are an agency and make rules.[1]
> As such the FCC has very little actual authority over stations outside of general technical requirements of the radio broadcast itself and no authority over content unless prompted by local complaints.
It’s pretty common of regulators to ask things of those they regulate. CMS asks for input regarding healthcare changes, EPA asks for input on new standards, and so one. Is there some impression that regulators just blindly bark orders and are punitive to those that don’t comply, even when compliance isn’t mandatory? Be as cynical as you want but I see this as pretty innocent and wish we still had a patriotic culture in America and I support finding ways to try to rebuild it. This seems reasonable and was only a request for common good of the nation. Make it political all you want but I don’t think that’s what it is.
I’m a cynical person but this is a reach. There’s a huge gap between what this is and how I interpret “mandatory”. There’s nothing even punitive being discussed. They’re free to meet their public interest obligations the normal way as well and not participate in this. They could also participate in this in a rebellious way if they so pleased. “While we don’t agree with the FCC…. We do think this is an important milestone in our nation worth celebrating… not because the FCC told us to but because…” it’s not dictating anything particular in how the programming celebrates American just asking that they lean into it in some special way they deem appropriate.
> Broadcasters can voluntarily choose to indicate their commitment to the
Pledge America Campaign and highlight their ongoing and relevant programming to their viewing and listening audiences.
The article said Carr has repeatedly threatened to punish broadcast stations for violating the public interest standard.
> They’re free to meet their public interest obligations the normal way as well and not participate in this.
Carr's view of public interest included suspending Jimmy Kimmel for his criticism of Trump and other MAGA figures after Charlie Kirk was killed.[1]
> They could also participate in this in a rebellious way if they so pleased. “While we don’t agree with the FCC…. We do think this is an important milestone in our nation worth celebrating… not because the FCC told us to but because…”
There would be no reason to state disagreement unless they thought it was a threat. And it would have the effects of a child saying they will go to sleep but not because their parent told them to.
I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.
For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.
I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.
I believe as a US citizen I have no say in how they make these decisions so this thought exercise is pointless. We all structure our governments differently and so compete globally with differing rules, I only care about how we do it here in the US. At times, what we do may be in reaction to others, but how we do it needs to be agreed upon here at home and for that we have a Constitution that gives this power to congress not the executive. I'm glad the court got it right, it's a glimmer of hope that the constitution still has some meaning.
The entire point of the WTO was that countries can cooperate globally to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers, so it does matter what you think of other countries' decisions.
I propose an idea that complete lack of protectionism (subsidies, tariffs, quotas) should not be the goal.
If we (countries) all are fully open, then we are fully globalised, and likely overall prices are lowest. (that is good)
But such system is fragile and very “shockable”, it entirely depends on stable shipping numbers and stable inter country agreements, both of which can be easily sabotaged (various motivations and agendas; just in 6 years: covid, Trump, Yemen Houthies)
Not implementable, but fun idea: protectionism based on distance, even within a country. E.g. supermarket must buy 10% of its apples from within 100km, 20% from within 1000km, 40% from within 10000km. (It does have numerous problems, feel free to identify them in comments)
I think a lot of time Congress being stuck is a feature, not a bug.
What happens when things aren't stuck, they change too much, in both frequency and magnitude. Kind of like when one person in the executive branch gets to make the rules. It's utter chaos and uncertainty on the business environment, even on the consumer environment, they have no idea what anything costs anymore. Am I paying double from a year ago because of tariffs or because it's easy for the seller to say tariffs, I'll never know. As a business, should I charge more now in anticipation for future uncertainty, has seemed simultaneously unfair and prudent. Now, should I reduce prices to go back to pre-tariff or just pocket it and call it inflation. Uncertainty is chaos, it's hard to plan for anything or make big decisions. This is why high(er) rates didn't hurt the housing market but all the Trump related uncertainty did.
With Congress completely stuck, the executive branch takes over a lot of functions that probably belong to the legislature. I say "probably" because the Constitution isn't really explicit about it, but it's what most people would infer.
The executive branch is less accountable than the legislative one. You elect only the top office, and only once every four years. With so much bundled into a single vote, it's nearly impossible to hold any specific action to account.
It doesn't work out great for the judicial branch, either. They often rule that a decision is based on the law as written, and it's up to the legislature to fix that -- while knowing full well that the legislature can't and won't. And they're not consistent about that; they'll also interpret a law to favor their ideology, and again Congress is in no position to clarify the intended interpretation.
Congress was deliberately set up to favor inaction, and not without reason. But that has reached the point where it practically doesn't even exist as a body, and its ability to serve as a check on the other branches has vanished, leading to even more abuses.
Congress could stop this nonsense tomorrow. The problem is not the body's powers, the problem is that the GOP is happy with Trump doing whatever the hell he wants.
Impeached, possibly. Conviction is effectively impossible.
That illustrates the structural problem. Congress was designed to have a high bar for action. But the bar is so high that it can't balance the other branches.
I'd argue that no system will work when so many voters are willing to overlook obvious crimes in order to remain in power. But even in less pathological circumstances, the legislative branch had too many internal checks to also participate in external ones.
I just tried it, its very cool, so it can not just summarize data, but also create and format table, however it can not create charts yet. I asked to create me on and it created another table and told me what i need to do in the UI to create a chart based on it
Ah got it, thanks a ton for the feedback! I suppose that’s helpful but not too different than using Google. There’s a ton of chart types that aren’t native that I need to create and so usually just google for specifics, it’s not always something I do with high frequency so don’t have the muscle memory of it. Would be very cool if I could find a tool that would fully execute the gui actions needed.
I have similar wants for other software. Where for example AI can do image generation, what I often what is it to take over my Photoshop app and perform all the steps like a graphic designer would. Then I’d have layers and such. Then I could take that to animation software and have an ai create me a rig and what not. I’ve not found anything quite like this yet
It seems efficient and simple that way. But you don't want federal politics playing that much of a part of your local life. And you don't want your local politicians to have to pander to the federal levels just to get what they need or what is theirs. I think this would result in disaster as the federal politicians are too out of touch with local needs.
If we had a single formula for taxes, then each taxing body could have their own rate table to apply to it, but still collect it directly - then I think that would be a better approach.
For simplicity sake, take income tax at flat rates. Federal may be 20%, your state might be 10%, city might be 5%. Maybe my state rate is only 5% and you might want to move here, but nationally we all pay the Federal 20% rate.
I tend to agree with this. The logic should be the same with different rate tables for each taxing body. What I don't want though is the Fed govt being the collector and distributor of all the funds. They already weld too much power with their various funding influences for transportation, healthcare, etc. The states and local govts shouldn't need to pander so heavily to the federal govt for funds.
Captured revenue : cost to capture (could be an audit, billing for interest/fees due, etc. lots of avenues to capture revenue that is being missed).
The problem is these metrics aren't really scalable productivity metrics. If you doubled cost, it might go to 100:1, if you tripled cost, it might go to 0.5:1
Each dollar generally gets more expensive to capture.
A key point is that there are large indirect costs that scale up rapidly that are not accounted for in these direct costs. These costs show up on the balance sheet somewhere else in the government, which makes the ROI for the auditors look much better than it actually is.
This is well-understood by the Federal government. When they set their targets they fully account for the growth of indirect costs created by the audit activity that don’t show up in the ratio.
Good point, and kind of interesting in that as we keep cutting funding to the IRS, this ratio will probably get wider (which looks good, but is actually bad for what it implies).
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